I-Extend

I-flex has organized a contest. That goes like this 'Biscope-Discover the director in you!'. Participant has to submit a short movie of 3-10 minutes duration. If won, the movie will be screened during induction in i-flex. I have made small home made 'movies' about my friends. Other colleagues were also enthu' about this. So we sent our registration.

The movie theme - as proposed by Jitendra Bhansali, is to show activities for the benefit of community by i-flex. The topic itself is good. During my induction, there was nothing that covered this dimension of i-flex.

I titled it 'i-Extend'. I-flex has this tendency to prefix 'i' like 'i-assist', 'i-share'. 'Extend' is the way i-flex is extending its hand to society.

I started collection 'material' for movie, only to find out that its not easy to get media clips etc from corporate communications group of i-flex. The responsible guy was on leave and that virtually shut the CCG doors for us. I relied on iflex intranet and googled some other stuff.

Without having video clips, one thing was sure. Our 'movie' will not be the movie in true sense. With only pictures and text, I had to create a 'movie'. I used Windows movie maker ( I had no options as I know and have worked on windows movie maker only ). I tried as many effects as I can, to provide some kind of motion (infusing life) to still images. For background music, I dragged my favorite slow song of the one movie [I edited this post later and removed name of movie to prevent any copyright trouble ;) ] into movie maker and chopped it apart. I selected the starting piece of song and used one more piece as filler. I kept on repeating 2nd piece for entire length of movie.

My most enthusiastic teammate - Mandar - himself needed enthu. He was ill and hence on leave. I missed him. But, Sachin, thanks to him, roped in. The movie was about 90% ready when I showed it to Sachin. Sachin liked it [that's what he told me :)]. He suggested me one brilliant idea. He told me to add introduction before the movie so that audience will have idea of what they are going to see. [I guess, while watching the movie, for the first half, he could not figure out what the heck was being shown ;)]. Introduction, that means background voice, like Mr. Bachchan in Lagaan. Now, question came, who will read it ? Immediately I thought of Prashant Rao. I knew that his voice is best fit for this. He has this 'strong' voice. [That's what I think ;)] We 3, sat together, got script ready and he recorded it many times before finalizing. Oh, boy.. hard work !! ;)

Finally, my colleagues started seeing the movie and I guess, they liked it. [At least, that's what they said. C'mon, no matter how bad your movie is, no one is going to say it 'bad' on face. I guess this is what they call 'professionalism' ;)]. Some of them like Talib and Jitendra came up with very good suggestions.

Well, the 'movie' is not a movie, but what I can say is, it is somewhere between an advertisement and a powerpoint presentation.

Let's wait for the result of contest...

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Update:
Bad news is, i-Extend was not a winner. Good news is it received some appreciation from jury (that's what I was told ;). The other movie - Life@i-flex, in which I contributed, won the 2nd prize. The team received cash prize and I was given a nice cute photo frame, having team picture, signed by all team members. It is here.. lying on my desk.... nice moments to cherish.
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